Doris Lessing - Love, Again

They were looking at each other with dislike. There was nothing for it but to laugh.

Then he insisted, 'I have been in love, seriously, with one woman.'

She waited for him to say 'my wife' — he was married — or someone else, but he meant Julie. She said, 'It's my turn to say that you have decided to forget. But that isn't the point. At the risk of being boring, art is one thing and life another. You don't seem to see the problem. In your version, her main occupation was being in love.'

'Wasn't being in love her main occupation?'

'She was in love a lot of her time. It wasn't her main occupation. But these days we cannot have a play about a woman ditched by two lovers who then commits suicide. We can't have a romantic heroine.'

Clearly she could not avoid this conversation: she reflected it was probably the tenth time in a month.

'I don't see why not. Girls are going through this kind of thing all the time. They always have.'

'Look. Couldn't we leave it to people who write theses? It's an aesthetic question. I am simply telling you what I know. Out of theatre experience. After all, even the Victorians made a comic song out of "She Was Poor but She Was Honest". But I think I know how to solve it.' Her duplicity with him would be limited to not telling him she had solved it already. 'We can leave the story exactly as you have it. But what will put the edge on it… there is something; I hope you are going to ask what.'

'Very well,' he said, and she could see that this was the moment when he finally gave up his play. With good grace. As one would expect from someone like him.

'We will use what she thought about it all… '

'Her journals!'

'Partly. Her journals. But even more, her music. There are her songs, and a lot of her music lends itself — we can use words from the journals and fit them to the music. Her story will have a commentary — her own.'

He thought about this an uncomfortably long time. 'It is astonishing — it is really extraordinary — the way Julie is always being taken away from me.' Here he looked embarrassed and said, 'All right, I know that sounds mad.'

She said, 'Oh well, we are all mad,' but, hearing her comfortable maternal voice, knew at once she was not going to be allowed to get away with it. Again she was finding his acute look hard to bear. 'I do wonder what it is you are mad about,' he remarked, with more than a flick of malice.

'Ah, but I've reached those heights of common sense. You know, the evenly lit unproblematical uplands where there are no surprises.'

'I don't believe you.'

You could say their smiles at each other, companionable but satiric, marked a stage.

The restaurant was emptying. They had come to the end of what they had to say to each other, at least for now. Both were making the small movements that indicate a need to separate.

'You don't want to hear any more of my ideas for the play?'

'No, I shall leave it to you.'

'But your name will be on it, with mine, as co-authors.'

'That would be more than generous.'

They left the restaurant, slowly. At this very last moment, it seemed they did not want to part. They said goodbye and walked away from each other. Only then did they remember they had been together for nearly three hours, talking like intimates, had told each other things seldom said even to intimates. This idea stopped them both, and turned them around at the same moment on the pavement of St Martin's Lane. They stood examining each other's faces with curiosity, just as if they had not been sitting a few feet apart, for so long, talking. Their smiles confessed surprise, pleasure, and a certain disbelief, which latter emotion — or refusal of it — was confirmed when he shrugged and she made a spreading gesture with her hands which said, Well, it's all too much for me! At which they actually laughed, at the way they echoed, or mirrored, each other. Then they turned and walked energetically away, he to his life, she to hers.

In the office, Sarah found Mary Ford making a collage of photographs for publicity, while Sonia stood over her, hands on her hips, in fact learning, but making it look as if she was casually interested.

Sarah told Mary that Stephen Ellington-Smith was a country gentleman, old style. That he was too magnanimous to be petty about his play. That he was, in fact, a poppet. Mary said, 'Well, that's a good thing, isn't it?' Sonia took in this exchange with her little air of detachment.

Sarah sat with her back to the two young women, pretending to work, listening… no, one young woman and a middle-aged one: she had to accept that about Mary, even if it did hurt. They had all become so used to each other… Sonia was there in that office — not strictly her territory — not only to learn but to stake a claim. She wanted to be made responsible for the next production, Hedda Gabler. 'You people will be busy with your Julie,' she said. There was no need for the two senior officials to confer: they knew what each other thought. And why not? They were not likely to find anyone sharper, cleverer — and more ambitious — than Sonia. 'Why not?' said Mary, and without turning around, Sarah said, 'Why not?' In this way confirming Sonia's position, and a much larger salary. Sonia left. 'Why not?' said Mary again, quietly, and Sarah turned herself about and smiled confirmation of Mary's real message, which was that there really was no doubt of it — an epoch was indeed over.

Sarah did not need a week to use Stephen's dialogue where it fitted, but decided to pretend she had needed that time, so he would not feel his contribution was inconsiderable. But when she was actually seated there, in her room, the mess of papers she was already calling the script spread about, a week did not seem too much. For one thing, she was unhappy with the existing translation of the journals. She had made her own of some of the passages, those that would accompany the music. She had had to get permission from the Rostands. 'After all,' she had written, 'it is only a question of a few pages. It is not as if I were proposing to make a new translation of all Julie's writings.' In fact she wished she could. She privately believed that people loving literature who chanced to read her translations would at once see how much better, more vivacious, her language was, how much closer to Julie's self. Perhaps one day she would make a new translation, choosing different passages: she did not necessarily agree with the English translator's choices. She understood Julie much better than… Sitting there, the word processor pushed to one side, for she was still at the stage of words scribbled on loose sheets with a Biro — yes, pretty old-fashioned, she knew — she thought, That's something of a claim I'm making… conceited? Perhaps. But I think it's true. This young woman hasn't understood the first thing about Julie… I care very much that her translation is flat, no effervescence. I care too much. I am altogether too much involved in this business. Yes, of course you have to be totally submerged in what you are working on, even if a week after it's finished you've forgotten it… What is it about that bloody Julie: she gets under people's skin; she's under mine. Look how this thing takes off, spreads itself about — she's blowing us all apart, and we know it. I really am intoxicated — probably all these months of listening to the music. Well, I have to listen to it this week… I'm making everything too complicated: I've spent years and years weighted with Duty, working like a madwoman, and if I don't watch out I'll go sailing off into the sky like a hydrogen balloon.

She sat, hour after hour, choosing words, hearing them: seductive. Like music, particularly when choosing words that will be congruous with music. The words, which she was already hearing sung, were running in her head. This is an affliction of words' users and makers. Words appear in your mind and dance there to rhythms you consciously know nothing about. Tags and rags of words: they can be an indication of a hidden state of mind. They can jiggle or sing for days, driving you mad. They can be like invisible film, like cling film, between you and reality. She was hardly the first person to have noted this. D. H. Lawrence, for instance: 'She was angry with him, turning everything into words. Violets were Juno's eyelids, and windflowers were unravished brides. How she hated words, always coming between her and life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the life out of living things.' Yes, this was an illustration of exactly what she complained of: there was the quotation, pat and patented, colonizing her mind. Well, when she had finished this task, Julie's words, not to mention the Countess Dié's, would linger and then sink back into that vast invisible Book of Great Quotations, leaving her in peace… she had long ago created a saving mental image, to be used at moments when her brain was so abuzz with words she seemed to prickle all over with their energy.